Response to Bodies That Matter

First of all, I have to say, I would’ve been screwed with these articles if I hadn’t had a lecture on performance/performativity in my rhetorical criticism class on Monday. So thank you Dr. Torres. Now I half get what is going on with Butler.

When Butler states on page 242, “Identification is used here not as an imitative activity by which a conscious being models itself after another; on the contrary, identification is the assimilating passion by which an ego first emerges” I understood this in terms of transsexuals or even drag queens. They are not imitating the look, mannerisms, etc, of women, this is an identity that emerges from their ego. It definitely questions that idea of gender or sex (I can’t decide which one to use because they seem controversial to Butler. And I am confused about that…). I thought the psychoanalytical aspect related to what Butler earlier says is at stake in a “reformulation of the materiality of bodies” when she states, “the construal of ‘sex’ no longer as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies” (236). I understood this to mean that sex and gender don’t really relate to the physical body, but the essence of sex and gender. Just because people are given bodies, or born with bodies, doesn’t mean they can relate to them physically or what people expect of bodies physically. They go beyond the cultural norms. People are more than cultural norms. They are challenging the cultural norms.

Online Portfolio Characteristics and Plans

When it comes to anything online, I like simple and manageable. That might have been my problem with many of the portfolios we looked at in class. Stephanie's seemed to be a little over all-over-the-place, both in terms of visual and navigability. I didn't mind Toby's. I liked the graphics he included, but it also seemed to cover a lot and to be honest, the yellow started to hurt my eyes. Obviously in a teaching portfolio, the creator wants to establish the kind of teacher they are; they might stress personality a little more than a professional portfolio. Professionally, I want my work to speak for me; as an educator, I want to be able to illuminate the kind of instructor I am with philosophies, anecdotes, etc.

That dichotomy is probably what will be the hardest for me to tackle in my portfolio. Since I am looking towards working in the academy, that will be the main focus of my portfolio. But, I also have a great deal of professional experience and I want to be able to touch on that as well, especially since I see myself more as a technical and professional communication educator. My plan is to look at it more as a resume. I want to post my CV and teaching philosophy. I want to have an area to discuss my research interests and what conferences I have attended. I will definitely talk a little about my professional career and display some clips of things I have done.

As for different modes, I will connect to this blog because even after this class is over, I plan on using it as an idea tank for myself, a place to brainstorm and work out concepts for myself. I think this will help a lot as I start working on my dissertation. I am playing around with the idea of linking it to my Twitter account... at least for now. I do Twitter about ideas and things going in school, but I do a fair share of personal tweets as well (I might be having my own Clancy dilemna). I am also wondering about including a page of projects I have done and including the audio story from last semester's class. I am still thinking of how I could make that fit, but I loved doing that story and thought it turned out really cool.

I want to have an environmental theme...not recycle signs all over the place, but more looking at colors and graphics that seem more natural. Being green is a big part of my identity, both personally and professionally, so this way I can hopefully convey this part of me in both areas of my life.

Now I've just got to get it done.

Research Question or Something Close

My current interest is looking at how online communities have developed and/or furthered the movement to "go green." I will be looking at sources that discuss the dynamics of online communities and hope to find some sources that deal directly with online communities in relation to social movements. I think it would be interesting to discover whether any of the articles address how much "community" comes out of online communities.

My Life in Technology

The Beginning

I remember the Christmas my brothers got an Atari. I thought it was so cool...they could play games on the television! However, I had no interaction with it whatsoever; my brothers threatened my very life if I even breathed on the consul. Perhaps that started my lifelong aversion to gaming.

The VCR was a much bigger presence in my life. I loved being able to watch movies over and over. My families loved to watch movies, so our VCRs were always well used. Video rental storeswere popping up all over the place. I once picked out a video and my father told me we couldn't rent that one because it was a Betamax video and our machine was a VHS machine. I witnessed the original home viewing format war - now that belongs to DVD vs. Blu-ray.

The Middle
Computers have become a huge part of my life, professionally and personally, but memories of using a computer are sparse before college. According to my parents, I learned to read on a Mac at school, using a then, new phonics program. They said I was reading within a week, but I don't remember this. I must have used one for word processing in high school, but I cannot recall a specific time. It became more important in college where it was required to type papers. So it was in 1996 that I first used Word and really, that was my only concept of working with a computer for a long time.

It was during college (the undergraduate degree) that I experienced my first non-word processing application on a computer. I fumbled through Quark Xpress in a journalism

editing class. We had to produce a one-sheet tabloid paper and more important than the finished product (it wasn’t that great), this was the first time I dived into a software and learned how to use it myself. It was a huge foundation for what I would end up doing for the rest of my life.

Personally, when I first started college, I was far away from home, far from all my friends, and it was difficult for me to make friends. Email made me feel better. As primitive as it was in 1996, it still allowed me to stay in touch with my friends. We all wrote back and forth about how school was harder than we thought, how it was strange to be away from home. Email was more than contacting professors and classmates (professionally, I think, people were still on the fence about it as communication at that time), it was a way to talk to friends, both far and near. I still have my first non-school email address. It has become my fallback email address, one where I send confirmations to what I buy, or the email I put in when I start an account somewhere, but I still have it.

The Rest (So Far)
Using my computer professionally and personally is still a major part of my life, and it has evolved with the changes technology and software have experienced.

While I was working on my Masters degree, software became very important to me. I made my first PowerPoint presentation (one of many). I no longer had to use Quark Xpress, I was able to use InDesign. I played my way to a working knowledge of Photoshop. I built websites with Dreamweaver. I tried Flash. I not only learned to use these, but I honestly became

interested in learning more. I paid attention when Adobe bought Macromedia and was excited about the possibilities. I read up on the differences in versions. My mentality was, why use a Word document, when you could use anything else.

Once I received my Masters degree and got a job as a Communications Coordinator, I was able to continue on the software path. I extensively used InDesign and Photoshop for all my projects and with each project I would try new techniques in each and I learned more and more about the capabilities of each program. It was a great accomplishment, learning more and learning it on my own.

On a personal front, I still continued to email as a way of keeping in touch with friends. I started using a Gmail account when it was still in Beta (when I needed an invitation to get an account). I started a blog and although there is talk that the blog is dead, I still have mine. I love my little blog; it's evolved just as much as I have.

Eventualy I became a social networker. I tried Friendster in 2003 (it was always so overloaded that it was hard to get on). I had a Facebook when I was getting my Master’s degree. I have a MySpace page. When I began looking for a job I consolidated my social networking memberships. I left Facebook (which, ironically, seemed boring at the time) and maintained MySpace. I have recently started Twittering and I’ve gone from MySpace back to Facebook (and to which I am addicted). All of these helped me keep in contact with friends, near and far.


Now I am able to bring all of this together and use it and study it in a new way. As an educator and researcher I am interested in how these different technologies and applications can work in the classroom. Students can work collaboratively through wikis. Students can keep a research journal on a blog. I hope to encourage students to dig into software like Dreamweaver and Photoshop and tell them it might be messy, but that’s how they are going to learn. Although I have been involved with some of these for more than ten years, they are still new in the education and research fields and really rich in terms of rhetoric and theory. I want to be apart of the wave that implements them in the classroom. That’s where I see my future - using all the tools in my box to their fullest capabilities.

Gaming as Educational/Cultural Activity

I'll admit that I have not played many video games, not even as a child (I am one of those unfortunate few that has never played Super Mario Brothers). I wasn't really that interested. I've become a little more interested as an adult. I've seen friends play Grand Theft Auto (although people really into that game are hard pressed to hand over the controls to that, even for a moment). I've played a little dance Dance Revolution. I LOVE Guitar Hero, but have only played it a few times.

When I think of my interest in certain games as an adult, I think that it is because of the cultural context of it all. When I first heard about Grand Theft Auto, it was the game where you could kill hookers, and I thought, "Now that, I kind of gotta see." That game, Dance, Dance Revolution, and Guitar Heros were all over as cultural references; everyone knew what they were. I think especially in the case of Guitar Hero, those were all songs that I knew and loved and to be with my friends and pretend I was a rock star reminded me of being a kid. That's probably how the Rock Band game came about. When Gee writes in ch.2 that, "The learner needs to learn not only how to understand meaning sin a particular semiotic domain that is recognizable to those affiliated with the domain, but, in addition, how they think the domain at a "meta" level as a complex system of interrelated parts," I feel that almost everyone can understand the semiotic domain of Guitar Hero. Who hasn't, young or old, from any culture, been to a concert, done air guitar, or dreamed of being a rock star?

I do think it can be an education activity as well. People are strategizing in ways they haven't before, thinking in ways they haven't before. When you master a game (maybe not the entire game, but finally get the "feel" of it), it can be a very gratifying feeling. Gee says it best in ch. 1: playing games to him, " a new form of learning and thinking was both frustrating and life enhancing."

Paper Idea

The following is a brief proposal I wrote for the Computers and Writing conference. I am really interested in how multimodality has made what is really scientific and complex information more accessible for the masses and how these websites has really furthered the green movement, in a grass roots movement sort of way.  :

People use computer technologies to make their lives easier. They go online to pay bills, find recipes, check their child’s school progress. They read blogs, join discussion boards and visit websites to forge relationships with other people with similar interests. Going online often works as a strong agent of change to bring people together in forums that, Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd explain, “require a public audience and usually seek as large an audience as possible, the rhetorical aim being to influence opinion or action.” Users‘ daily online experiences broaden social and cultural dynamics and allow people to interact on a global scale, and the sites they visit provide people more accessibility to ideas and practices they otherwise would not. They are similar to a Bakhtinian chronotope, which C.F. Schryer describes as genres that reflect social beliefs in the action of individuals in space/time interactions (84). The current movement to “go green” is one such example of people coming together to learn more about and further their environmental lifestyles.

This presentation examines ways websites like Tree Hugger and Planet Green and blogs like Ideal Bite have made “going green“ more accessible to a wider audience. These sites offer people tips and provide how-to articles that will help them go green in their daily lives. These readers may not totally understand what a carbon footprint is, but they are learning to reduce their own. These multimodal sites offer various media from videos about starting a compost to podcasts featuring interviews with celebrities and their efforts to go green; blurring boundaries by continuously teaching, while entertaining users at the same time. This presentation will be a rhetorical analysis on the ways these sites use multiple media and discussion forums
to build online communities.

Web 2.0

What genre/application of Web 2.0 is most appealing or potentially useful to you and why?

I am pretty interested in most of the Web 2.0 applications; although I know this is not helping to narrow anything down.

I think podcasting is really interesting because I feel like it is bringing back the feeling of old fashioned radio.

Professionally, I think that wiki's and microblogging would be interesting to research because it seems as though it would be beneficial in the workplace and in the classroom.

I also think that social and professional networking are interesting because I have joined those communities and the access to so many people is amazing.